Predatory Consent?

This is going to be a controversial post and I make no apologies for that. OK, I make a teensy apology for it. I’m sorry if you take offence at what I write. I’m not trying to offend you, I’m just trying to get to the underlying issues in the responses to a recent court case here in the UK and in doing so I might say something that you don’t agree with. You might even misunderstand me, but if you do I ask that you don’t deliberately misunderstand me. OK?

Right, to business. The outcry today after a thirteen year old girl was called “predatory” in a court case where a forty-one year old was found guilty of abusing her was widespread. The response by some was direct and to the point – how dare a barrister or a judge describe a victim in this way? The narrative was one of a misogynist culture demonizing the victim of such an assault, blaming her for leading the adult on. As Polly Toynbee wrote on the Guardian website,

How familiar this is. When in doubt, the female temptress is to blame, the old Eve â€“ or in this case, a very young one. The little vixen had led astray a 41-year-old man found to have images of child abuse and bestiality on his computer. But never mind, the indelible image ofÂ Nabokov’s LolitaÂ allows men to side with Humbert Humbert. Girls are never innocent, they are born knowing, alluring seductresses at any age, asking for it, in one way or another.

Hmmmm… A number of points need to be made.

What needs to be said right at the start is that there is absolutely no doubt that the 41 year old man was completely and utterly culpable for what he did. There is absolutely no excuse for having sex with a minor. If a teenager comes onto me as an adult it does not matter how assertive he or she is, I am the adult in the situation and I bear full responsibility for the outcome in the encounter. It does not matter if a teenager strips suggestively in front of me (as is alleged in this case), I am the adult and I should know better. Nothing that follows is intended to undermine this basic fact.

If you read some of the reports of the evidence presented in the case it is very clear that this girl was deeply damaged and that she did exactly what is alleged of her – come onto the 41 year old in question. While she may have been operating out of a place of deep brokeness and be entirely a victim, is it indeed fair to describe such behaviour as predatory? The idea that you cannot name a sinful action in a person just because they have been sinned against is something I am very uncomfortable with pastorally. Often in our counselling work as clergy we have to challenge behaviour in people who are victims, because although they are shaped by their wounds they are still responsible for their own actions in response to those wounds. This is part of the growth of discipleship, that we accept that we are agents of sin in the world as much as we are the victims of it.

The cries of misogyny in this matter are groundless. What if it had been a teenage boy being sexually provocative with an adult woman? Would calling him predatory be misandry? Isn’t this really not a sexist issue but rather a matter of how we want to protect children full stop?

Â The notion that a minor can or cannot give consent for sex is a complicated matter. We speak of “informed consent” (because in this case the girl very clearly gave consent even though she may very well have not understood the consequences of her actions) but we very rarely define what to be informed means. The law states that children under the age of sixteen cannot give informed consent and that it is an unqualified crime to have sex with someone under the age of 13 and having sex with someone between the ages of 13 and 16 is also a crime if it was reasonable to assume you were aware they were under the age of 16. There are also restrictions on having sex with someone between the ages of 16 and 18 if you have any form of authoritative relationship with them (i.e. you are their teacher).
The problem of course is that the age limit in this regard is to some extent arbitrary. It is apparent to anyone who has spent time with a significant number of teenagers that some fourteen year olds are perfectly capable of giving informed consent and some seventeen year olds are clearly not, despite their legal ability, emotionally capable of making such a significant decision. But regardless, we set the bar at age sixteen.

We have however the peculiar situation where the law says that you can’t have sex under 16, but statutory agencies help you to have sex under the age of 16. Don’t believe me? Here’s the NHS Live Well website on the subject.

Will they tell my parents?

Contraception services are free and confidential, including for people under 16 years old. This means that the doctor or nurse wonâ€™t tell your parents, or anyone else, as long as they believe that you’re mature enough to understand the information and decisions involved. There are strict guidelinesÂ for healthcare professionals who work with people under 16. If they believe that there’s a risk to your safety and welfare, they may decide to tell your parents.

Am I the only person who thinks this is bizarre? How can something be illegal and yet facilitated by the State? Of course, the reason why this contradiction occurs is because of the elevation of the self and the supremacy of consent – it does not matter whether something is immoral or not, if the people doing it consent that who are we to deny them that activity? Why should we prosecute two teenagers for doing something that they consent to? But wait, didn’t we a moment ago say that minors couldn’t give informed consent? Which is it to be?

This leads us to another startling observation and question. Why are we complaining that teenagers have consensual informed sex with adults when we bombard them with sexual imagery from an early age and we sexualise them with the kind of clothes that are really not suitable for them to wear?Â And of course the irony of the link I provide to see this in action is that the very newspaper complaining about sexualising children with this kind of clothing itself sends out a message every day on its third page that woman are sex objects. This is the heart of the problem – we want to demonise those parts of a liberal society that don’t appeal to us but we want to defend our right to do what we want without the disapproval of others. It simply won’t stick but vast numbers in our society apply logical blinkers to avoid this very problem.

And so back to this unfortunate 13 year old caught at the centre of this tragic sexual abuse case. I wonder whether the reason so many people are so angry at the assertion in a court of law that this girl was sexually predatory and eager to have intercourse with the adult (even though the man in question should very clearly have refused) is that to accept this is to unravel the complicated web of denial and contradiction that our society creates to avoid the problems around the morality of all kinds of sexual activity, let alone underage intercourse. In a society that will not accept the Biblical call to holiness of sex within and only within the marriage of a man and a woman, our god and point of authority instead becomes consent. But we then have to deny this particular girl her right to give consent because our deification of the concept leaves us in a deeply disturbing place when faced with the situation of an adult having sex with a teenager. To defend ourselves from this contradiction we introduce the notion of “informed consent” which we then link to a subjective barrier (turning 16) which in and of itself gives absolutely no guarantee that an individual will be in any way informed enough to make a valid decision. We compound this situation by insisting that it is utterly inappropriate to suggest in a court of law that minors ever desire to have sex with adults and that they attempt to create situations where that occurs because we want to protect this notion of informed consent to allow ourselves as adults to be able to consent to whatever we want to do sexually and not have any societal disapproval. However, whilst we consequentially insist that minors cannot give informed consent for sex, we then facilitate their uninformed consent by equipping them to engage in their uninformed choice to have sex if they so choose, just as long as the person they do it with is aged under 16, despite the fact that it is illegal. And all this because consent is king, because consent is the ultimate arbiter of morality. You can do anything you want as long as it’s consensual, but then again you can’t if we say you can’t if it makes us uncomfortable.

And then we wonder why our society has so many broken people sexually.

Obviously, to point out that 13 year olds can be sexually predatory is to invite comment. Most of it based on straw-doll arguments. To say that such children can be sexually predatory is not to defend the men who succumb. It is not to argue for a lowering of the age of consent. And it is not to argue that “she was asking for it” (though she literally did, it seems). It is no more, and no less, to state a fact â€“ that people under the age of 16 can have a sexual will and act to achieve it.

This is repellent to some minds. It flies in the face of their world-view, it is to challenge the sometimes twisted ideology that inveigles some crevices in the child protection movement. They cannot encompass the idea that children can be sexual, let alone predatory. I find this worrying, even frightening, that such a denial of reality can take such deep roots that to challenge it is beyond civilised discourse. Such stupidity craves challenge.

It is possible to advocate child protection whilst accepting that some children are sexual beings. It is possible to admit that some people under 16 can have sex willingly, without trauma, and yet not be advocating sex between them and adults. In short, no matter how sexually predatory a child may be, it does not excuse â€“ even implicitly â€“ the adults involved.

Once this is accepted, even slightly, then the Outraged move on to their ultimate argument â€“ that children (even if sexual) are not sufficiently endowed with emotional or moral reasoning to be allowed to make sexual choices. This may or may not be true; it is largely irrelevant to my argument. For the very same people who heap abuse on anyone who dares throw the reality of biology into the faces of the po-faced are the ones who cheerfully insist that children who have sex with other children are abusers and should be thrown in prison.

Interesting…. So kids are not sexual. Or even if they are, they are not responsible. Ever. Unless we decide they are. Then we throw them before the courts and hold them accountable for the very sexuality we deny they are capable of being responsible for.

The Tech Stuff

Two Final Things

No one could describe
the Word of the Father;
but when He took flesh from you, O Theotokos,
He consented to be described, and restored the fallen image to its former beauty.
We confess and proclaim our salvation in word and image.
Kontakion of the Triumph of Orthodoxy